The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
It is becoming increasingly common for shoppers to search for the particular product in which they are interested using electronic search mechanisms, such as Internet-based search engines. As used herein, the term “product” refers to any form of sellable unit, including services, intangibles, and physical and software products. The complex systems used by such electronic search mechanisms to process incoming product data from multiple merchants, and deliver that product data in the form of search results to millions of customers, must ensure that customers receive the best information available. In order to do this, data that represents an offer to sell a particular product by a particular party, referred to herein as “product offering information”, must be obtained for multiple product offerings. Once obtained, the information must be categorized in order to, among other things, determine how much merchants associated with the product offerings are charged for inclusion of the product offerings in the corresponding search mechanism. Merchants are often charged a certain amount of money by the search engine owner every time a product of the merchant is selected by a user of the search mechanism—a cost-per-click (CPC) charge.
One approach to categorizing product offerings is the manual categorization approach. In the manual categorization approach, a human operator assigns product offerings to product categories. A problem with the manual categorization approach is that it is time and resource consuming, since a human operator must assign each product offering to a product category.
Therefore, based on the foregoing, it is clearly desirable to provide a mechanism for automatic product categorization.